Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum capitalized on one of his signature stances, his opposition to abortion, to a room of Christian conservatives at Saturday’s Family Leader forum.

Answering a question on America’s lost battles, Santorum said the gap between America’s laws and God’s laws casts anxiety on the nation.

“Unlike Islam, where the higher law and civil law are the same, in our case we have civil laws. But our civil laws have to comport with the higher law,” Santorum said. “As long as abortion is legal – at least according to the Supreme Court – legal in this country, we will never have rest because that law does not comport with God’s law that says all life has value. And as long as there is an incongruence between the two, we will have agitation.”

Santorum, who has a long record of focusing on the Middle East dating to his tenure in the Senate, took the strongest pro-war stance of any candidate.

“Americans have a rather short attention span. That’s because we’re a young country. An antique for us is 100 years old,” the candidate said. “As a result, when we’re engaged in this long war, long to us is not the same as long to them.”

Santorum said that energy resources in the Middle East enabled terrorists to acquire new technology, posing a new threat to the U.S.

“There’s a thousand-year conflict between radical Islam and the West that ended because of the West’s great superiority,” he said. “But that changed with a three letter word: oil.”